Things to say.

I really suck at keeping a blog right? Don’t answer that. I actually have a lot to write about but I don’t know how I would say it.

2011 started on a pretty low point. I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. My money from JSA had been stopped in November. I couldn’t find a job. I had almost no money. I had things to pay for. I was in trouble and it had been getting worse for months because I like to bury my head in the sand. But something changed when the Wheel turned on the 20th of March. That light at the end of the tunnel started off as a pinprick but slowly grew; I just couldn’t see it yet.

In February I decided to change my spirituality. Christened as a baby, I was felt I had a duty to have some sort of believe in Christianity. I love the symbolism of it and I love the faith itself. But I have never been a Christian. As you may have noticed from other entries, I love the earth. I believe in Mother Nature and believe that she is in control. Chris brought me back two books from the charity shop, ‘Wicca’ and ‘Paganism’, as a joke in reference to Buffy and Willow. Something clicked in my head. This is the path I have been on for all of my life. I just didn’t understand it yet. I came to realise that this is what I truly believed in. Everything the book said made sense to me and when I got to the part that said:

“Mining, logging, deforestation, the lowering of the water table, all these short-term economic benefits were persued at the expense of the long-term viability of our planet. Nature was seen as available for exploitation; we were in control. We were wrong. The powers of the elements are not under our control. We cannot hold back the seas that erode our coastlines, the gales that destroy cities and forests, the raging forest fires of over-dry summers, or the earthquakes and volcanoes that threaten to engulf some of our land. Climatic change, global warming, environmental conferences, CFC gases; our newspapers are full of such phrases. Nature is like our mother. We can abuse her and she will tolerate us because we are her children; but there will become a point where she has had enough. The Great Mother gives birth to our species, but she also receives us into death.” – Vivienne Crowley

I knew that is something I have agreed with all of my life. Finally I have found the path that I can follow and one I understand. Some will associate Wicca with witchcraft and they would be correct. But not all Wiccans call themselves witches and not all witches call themselves Wiccans. It is a spirituality where there are no set guidelines or rules (other than the Wiccan Rede and their own Book of Shadows). There is no bible or other holy book. Each Wiccan is free to follow his or her own path. I am going to be an eclectic Wiccan which means I will be borrowing from different traditions and making my own which most definitely suits me! I will have my Sabbat altar where I will celebrate the Wheel of the Year. I will have my Sabbat rituals and will do them skyclad (yes naked) and I will have a cauldron (a symbol for the womb and fertility – not hubble tubble toil and trouble). But I will not be a witch. Not yet anyway I will have a besom/broom which is a symbol for luck. Witches got the notion of flying on their brooms from flying ointment which made them high and made them believe they were actually flying! I will celebrate Hallowe’en with more glee than I already do (I knew there had to be a reason for loving Hallowe’en so much!!!). My easter starts on the 20th of March, not when people take the cue from Christianity (even non-religious types!). My Christmas has become Yule and starts on the 21st of December.

My aunt Jacqueline is a Buddhist and she has her own sanctuary in her flat. Some Wiccans borrow from Buddhist beliefs. She is pleased that I have chosen a similar path.

Last week I was at my lowest point. My mum sorted out my money problems but I still had no money. On Wednesday, I got a missed call and it turned out to be from a job I applied for about 2 weeks ago. I was invited to an interview and the job is in Kingston. We arranged it for Friday morning.

I chose my black shirt, my navy trousersuit and my Arabian Glow Teal Waters nail varnish and a matching necklace and eyeshadow. I caught the train at 09:18 and got to Kingston at 10:25. I got to the place and I liked it straight away. Although small, it was familiar to me and had a display of laptop chargers in the counter. I got to see the man at 11:15ish. The interview went very well and I think he liked me because of my experience. So afterwards, I went off and wandered around Kingston for about fifteen minutes before getting bored and catching the train to go home. I was home in just over an hour and I was shattered after waking up at 6:30am.

At around 3pm, I started drifting off to sleep. My phone rang at 3:30pm and I was offered the job. I’m gonna enjoy getting the train in the morning

So in one week, my life changed. It is funny how these things happen. As I said, I definitely felt something shift when the Wheel turned and it was Ostara. It is the time of of fertility, birth and renewal. Pretty appropriate that this has happened at this time of year. Do you see why I feel so connected to it? I don’t expect you to understand but it is what I believe in. It is what I have always believed in. I just didn’t fully know it yet (I always had a ‘feeling’ but I never knew what it was).

Another thing I wanted to talk about was the earthquakes and tsunami that occured in Japan on the 11th of March. I feel other than my love for Japan, it is appropriate for what I have been saying about Mother Nature and how she is in control and has always been. I am heartbroken by what happened and I know that they will get back on their feet.

I also have another entry about Selsey and their connection to the sea coming up (I even gathered news articles a while ago!).

Oh! And another thing which doesn’t relate to any of the above. Two words.

LAS. VEGAS.

This trip will be happening in around 2030 (ha) and it will consist of me, Chris, Raj, Chris G and Nicolai having the week of our lives in beautiful Nevada. We will get the plane to Atlanta then shall road trip across (I know it is a long way) to Nevada. We will lose money in the casinos, watch a booby show or three, swim in the Flamingo’s tropical pool, visit the Mob exhibition at the legendary Tropicana and best of all, visit the Little A’Le’Inn and Area 51. It will be amazing and I cannot wait.

Another thing.

Christina Aguilera. The Voice. With Adam Levine.

*Dies of too much fan girl goodness*

THAT IS A DREAM COME TRUE. My two favourite artists working together. I swear that of they collabo, I will die of happiness and will need to be rescusitated(sp???).

Ok, now I am rambling and not making much sense. I had my hair cut too. It is now just below my shoulders and I have a fringe. Yes. I like it and I am growing out the colour from December. It is much lighter than it was as well because I have been using the John Frieda Blonde stuff. Jane said that my hair is in terrible condition and I had to get it into better condition before she will do anything with it. I want blonde highlights again.

Ok bye.

Tippy x

PS:- I guess I did know how to say it afterall.

2010 in a nutshell =)

*Looks sheepish*.

Hello.

Shall I do my updates?

Jennifer Testa

Well, as you can see from previous updates, we sadly lost Manda’s mum to cancer. I attended her funeral with Chris and supported Manda. It was a really nice service and it was obviously really sad as well. In fact, I can’t believe it’s been nearly a year since she died already! Manda seems to be coping well and has got on with her life although not have her mum there in person for Christmas was really hard for her I think that’s what I was going to say on this.

Chris

I can’t remember lol. Does that make me a bad girlfriend? This was all the way back in June!

Work

I finished at Open Door but Jackie is trying to get me back there! I was told I hadn’t been allowed back because the guy in charge of payments knows me.

Birds

In May, we got an Avery with cockatiels and with Jack, that makes 8 altogether!

Glasses

I got a pair of Transitions lenses. Yep.

Weddings

This really should be the big one tbh. In June, my cousin Steven got married to Donna:

And in September, Martin and Stephanie got married:

Other things that happened (in no particular order):

Sadly, a few days after this picture was taken, we lost our beautiful boy. His health deteriorated rapidly, he fell asleep and he died at 2am. I regret not doing a separate entry for him as I don’t remember the exact day he died RIP old boy, we love you and miss you.

We decorated the bathroom (yes, that is a very bright pink):

Daniel’s 18th birthday:

Got pretty drunk on Jacques cider and brandy. Also had some weird wine stuff that looked like Rosé but tasted like red wine. Bluergh. We also let off chinese lanterns.

Infest:

Got to Bradford at around 8:30am and it was a pretty good weekend. I think we were a bit put out because it was all so different! On the Saturday, we weren’t allowed into the town centre because of riots. When we got to the uni, there was extra security and we could hear the helicopter over the city (which is about a mile away).

London Film and Comic Con:

This was a brilliant day!!! I met the Cigarette Smoking Man and the cast from Being Human! I lost my favourite belly bar though

Museum of London:

Our original plan was that Chris had a meeting with an employment agency in Farringdon and as it turns out, we went for a wander and discovered that the Museum of London was a few minutes walk away! So we went off and it was good! I’ve been there before and it was only the bit about Celtic Britain that reminded me of what it was like when I went there. The Victorian section freaked me out a little as it felt like I remembered what it was like. Chris described it as deja vu. The little Vauxhall exhibition freaked me out even more because it was so familiar.

Leysdown:

We went to the Isle of Sheppey the week before Halloween and it was good but cold. The sea was really high so the beach was closed. Dunican knocked his pint on my lap and I felt tipsy on lager for the first time ever. Um… that’s about it lol.

Buffy/Angel:

This year, I got back into Buffy and Angel in a big way. Collecting stuff and I have all the DVD’s now too. Loads of books! Buffy’s silver cross. Just finished the Buffy DVD’s and have a whole season of Angel left. I am sad about this. I need to get a big shelf in my room for all my stuff :p

THE HAIR:

White blonde, pink, fruit salad, pink and blonde, Katie Weasel, golden mahogany brown, Rod Stewart and now darker golden mahogany brown. My hair has seen a lotta colours this year.

Burlesque:

NotmuchtosayotherthanIhaven’tseenityet #badstan

Snow:

We had a lotta snow this year! On three separate occasions; January, November and December. If it had snowed like that at the same time, it would have been the same amount of snow we had in February 2009! It snowed the week before xmas and disappeared yesterday after a few days of ice rink.

Christmas 2010:

Nothing spectacular happened tbh. I got Jack the Ripper: The Casebook, The Titanic Experience book, loads of chocolate, Hello Kitty brush with my name on it, Buffy silver cross necklace, Snuggie, slippers, 2 china Geisha dolls, Buffy Watcher’s Guide vol. 3… um… I don’t remember what else lol.

I think that’s about it to be honest. 2010 has been a bit crap lol. Hope 2011 is better I’ve got a few plans tbh.

Do an 8-week pre-Navy training training course (I wanted to join the Navy but thanks to Labybloodyrinthbloodyitis, I can’t!

Start my Interior Design Courses with the National Design Academy. It’ll start off with Diploma then I’ll go onto Foundation Degree and then BA(Hons).

Finish learning to drive.

They’re my main goals!

But yeah. That’s all for now.

Tippy x

Derek would be proud!

When I was 16, I had a group of friends who were a mixture of boys and girls. One weekend, we stayed at our friend’s house (we did this nearly every Saturday for that whole summer) and that particular night, one of the girls drank nearly a whole bottle of vodka (you know the square shaped bottles) so she was asleep upstairs. The rest of us were sitting the front room, all the lights off and the tv on, just flicking through the channels (probably music channels) and I was sat on the end of the sofa, near the hallway door. I saw someone walk past towards the stairs. I thought, “hmm, I thought we were all in here” so I asked and I was right, other than the girl upstairs. My friend, who lives in the house, looked at me like I had just said something outstanding. He then went onto say that there is a spirit of an old man in their house; their whole family had seen him. His mum told me about it the next morning when I told her about what I saw.

Something else that happened that night was when we were settling down to sleep. I wasn’t sleepy at all. Suddenly, I heard someone crying out my name. It sounded like someone who was really scared and distressed, almost wailing. I sat up and I was so certain of what I was hearing (I actually thought it was the girl upstairs calling me), I woke my boyfriend up and made him come with me. When we got upstairs, I couldn’t hear it anymore. I went into the room where the girl was sleeping and she was just sitting in the middle of the floor, as calm as anything. She insisted that she wasn’t calling my name.

6 years later, I’m still 100% sure of what I heard and what I saw. Some people may dismiss it as my imagination but this isn’t the first time it happened to me. I believe in spiritualism. Maybe not “ghosts” but certainly in the energies in the earth. I believe that there is residual energy left behind by souls and that everything is sewn into the fabric of buildings, almost like a photograph, captured in time. If that makes sense. I feel that I can sense things, I know when there’s something there. I mean, I can’t go into a house and say, “ooh, there’s a young girl child” a lá Justin aka Derek Johnson aka Derek Acorah.

This all started when I was quite young and there’s a room in my nan’s house which I always really didn’t like. It’s at the front and it’s a small room where my uncle used to sleep (RIP Stephen). The wallpaper was old fashioned, the wardrobes still full of his clothes. My nan and grandad used to keep the chest freezer in there as well as it being my nan’s sewing room. I pretty much used to refuse to go in there one my own and never liked going upstairs alone. As the years went by, the room got redecorated but the feeling never left me. One night, when I was about 12 or 13, I was trying to sleep in the back bedroom. My nan was sound asleep in the other bed on the other side of the room as she knew I didn’t like being in there on my own.

As I tried to sleep, I was certain I saw a white shape jump across the room and thinking back on it now, I’m not so sure it’s what I thought it was. As the years went by again, I was staying at my nan and grandad’s again and we were just downstairs watching tv in the evening, it was probably about 8 or 9 o’clock. All of a sudden, I heard banging around upstairs. I looked at my grandparents and my grandad said, “oh, don’t worry, it’s just our ghost”. Now, my grandad is a very intelligent witty man and I’m the only person in the world who gets his jokes as they tend to go over other people’s heads and he can be quite cynical when he wants to be. I know when he’s being serious and that night, he was. Naturally, I just stared at him, wondering if he was being serious or not because admittedly, sometimes it’s hard to tell. My nan, who usually rebuffs his jokes, went onto say that she sometimes feels someone blowing on her face when she’s trying to sleep in the back room. Some time after, I spoke to my mum and my auntie Jacqueline about it and they told me it was true and they had too seen/sensed things in that house when they lived there. They went on to say that they believed that it was their uncle Charlie, my grandad’s twin.

In March 2008, I split up with Chris for seven weeks and one of those weeks, I stayed there. My nan stayed in the back room with me but I feel that whoever was there has gone now. Upstairs still has it’s feeling but it’s certainly not as intense as it was. I hope that whoever it was found their door and passed through it peacefully.

My house certainly isn’t haunted and neither is Chris’ so why do we see what we see? An old man called Jim owned our house before we did. I used to talk about Jim. I knew what he looked like. He died before I was born. At the top of our stairs, sometimes you can smell tobacco. Not just ordinary tobacco but the kind you get in cigars. It used to get really strong and there was nowhere for it to come from – we say, “I can really smell Jim today” and that’s how we always used to refer to it. As the years went on it became less and less common. Now it’s rarely said. When I was little, I used to describe my nan who had passed away before I was born. Obviously, I didn’t know what she looked like but my mum always used to wonder how I knew. A few years ago, my uncle stayed at ours and he and my dad went to the pub one night. My uncle sat on a wall and refused to move despite my dad desparately trying. My mum was the only one that got him to move. The next day, she swears that she saw my nan standing in the hallway where a picture of all her sons and her daughter hangs. My mum thinks that she was protecting her son. when we saw Derek at Fairfield Halls (for a laugh mainly), he started talking about an old lady with one leg in a wheelchair and pointed in my general direction. I swear that if he came and spoke to me, I would’ve been a believer.

Where the PC is, it’s quite easy to see something out of the corner of your eye and when Charlie said that he could see someone standing there, I used to say, yeah sure until I saw it myself. It’s so clear that I actually nearly spoke to it once because I thought it was someone in the kitchen! When I was drying my hair once in my mum and dad’s room, I saw someone walk past the bedroom! As before, it was so clear that I honestly thought it was someone else!

When me and Chris used to sleep downstairs in the back room, at night time someone ran around Scott’s room above. Thump, thump, thump etc. Scott is 25 years old and there’s no room to run around in his bedroom. As I lay awake at night, I wondered what the hell it was. The next day, I told Chris about it. When we started sleeping upstairs again, someone ran up and down the stairs and again, I mentioned it to Chris and he said, “yeah, I know” which means it’s not my imagination. If you walk past the bottom on the loft conversion’s stairs you see someone sitting on the stairs. Chris described seeing exactly the same thing as me before I managed to tell him the whole story. Do we share the same imagination? I think not. He’d know more about his house than I do.

In addition to Jim and my nan in my house, Dolly Dog is still there too. I hear her barking sometimes, hear her tapping around at night. Quite often, I’m tempted to call for her. Sometimes I think I even see her under my feet. My Dolly foot sensors are still active. And even my dad, the most pessimisstic man I know, admitted that he senses her/hears her sometimes. I think she chose not to cross over yet. It’s been nearly a year since she was gone already. When Ruby died, she was gone, we couldn’t feel her there anymore, same with Princess but Dolly being who she was, she obviously decided to stay.

In regards to Ruby, she was with us when we went to Selsey in October 2007, we know that. There was no way she’d miss out on that

So what does this all mean? Everyone has their own opinions and their own feelings about it. It’s been a long time since I felt anything in a place; it actually grew stronger but now I’m probably out of practice.

What do you think? Comments below

Derek Jr x

Yay Pt.2

So as I said before, lappy is home. Had to do a ton of updates and it took ages and ages. It was being really really slow too. So today, finished updating and I uninstalled some stuff. It’s running much better now and seems more like my laptop! It’s weird seeing everything brighter and clearer on this screen. I thought everything looked really squished before and now it just looks normal again. I have Danzatore on here now so I can carry on writing it. Really paranoid about my laptop too now. I keep thinking it’s gonna break. The mouse/touchpad thing is still annoying me too. Just so pleased it’s back though and I can finally use it! Still doesn’t feel like it’s mine though. It’s really weird but I’m sure I’ll get used to it soon.

Sitting next to Chris on the chair now. He’s keeping me warm ^_^ Means I have to watch his silly games now though and he smells

So the snow is all over and done with now; just got LOTS of rain to come. It’s good because I like rain!

So is that it? Can we go home now? [/Stripped]

Tippy x